The video of Tyre Nichols’ arrest makes for unbearable viewing. The 29-year-old father is dragged out of a car before being set upon by five black policemen. Lawyers for his family said the officers acted like a ‘pack of wolves’; after watching the film, it’s hard to dispute that description.
As the backlash to the incident in Memphis on 10 January intensifies, there are plenty of unanswered question. But it seems that Black Lives Matter is already jumping to conclusions. Any hope that Nichols’ horrifying death might spark some unity in the United States has been dashed by the release of a demoralising statement from BLM. Rather than using Nichols’ death to campaign for meaningful reform, BLM has doubled down on its mission to defund the police while suggesting any violence perpetrated against people of colour is automatically racist.
‘Tyre should be alive today,’ says D’Zhane Parker, a board member for the BLM ‘Global Network Foundation’. That’s a view we can, of course, all agree on – but the tone of the BLM statement soon veers off into the hazy netherworld of systemic racism.
‘He mattered to everyone,’ the statement continues ‘except those upholding state-sanctioned violence and a dangerous cycle of white supremacy.’
‘Today, our community is grieving another beautiful Black life stolen by state sanctioned violence. There continues to be a consistent failure of our current public safety model to protect Black lives and communities’.
BLM’s statement about ‘state sanctioned violence’ omits an important detail: the five officers involved in the incident have been charged with second-degree murder.
There is no doubt that the White House needs to urgently get a grip on the relentless cycle of police brutality. But the action taken against these officers shows that this incident, while horrifying, is no more ‘sanctioned’ by the state that the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
Ben Crump, Nichols’ attorney, has called on Congress to pass federal police reform legislation in the wake of the 29-year-old’s death. ‘Shame on us if we don’t use his tragic death to finally get the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed,’ he said.
Crump, who also leads the Floyd family legal team, is demanding that Biden make a renewed push for policing reform, saying he should ‘marshal the United States Senate’ and ‘try to get the House to reengage.’ Although this legislation, introduced in the House of Representatives back in February 2021, passed the House under Democratic control, talks for a compromise in the Senate collapsed. BLM should stand with Crump and push for the legislation, which aims to combat police misconduct, excessive force and racial bias.
But Parker and BLM appear to be taking a different approach: demanding that the system ‘prioritise holistic, health-centred, community-driven approaches that will help advance true public safety’.
‘We continue to be devastated by the current system that prioritises punishment, harm, and criminalisation,’ says Parker.
But Parker must surely realise by now that the public cannot rely on the goodwill of ‘the community’ to keep them safe. Such utopian fantasies have already been tried in cities such as San Francisco and Seattle after the death of George Floyd; one only has to look at the chaos that has descended on these once great metropolises to realise that a robust, proportionate police force is the only way to keep people safe.
By persisting in delusional community-driven solutions, BLM is undermining what many still see as its primary purpose: protecting minorities. And how can we take Parker seriously when he asserts that Nichols’ death was part of a ‘dangerous cycle of white supremacy,’ now that we know the identity of those arrested in connection with the death? Is Parker suggesting that those responsible for this appalling incident had no agency and were driven to what they did by some invisible power structure?
BLM’s statement goes on to attack media for its coverage of this incident:
‘Although the media has spent a great amount of time drawing attention to the fact that the police officers are Black, as if that is important, let us be clear: ALL Police represent the interest of capitalism and impel state-sanctioned violence’.
Is Parker really suggesting that it was capitalism that killed Nichols? If so, he is doing BLM no favours. Parker says BLM will ‘continue to push for an abolitionist approach to public safety’, suggesting that he won’t be happy until the police are off the streets altogether.
Those police officers who are responsible for what happened to Nichols should, of course, be brought to justice. No is saying otherwise. But ‘defunding’ the police altogether will sow only further division and chaos – and minorities living in some of the poorest parts of the United States will end up paying the price.
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